Re: Use of DCO
On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 02:25:36PM +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
For everyone else: this involved developers being asked, and at
least verbally affirming, that they have written the patch
themselves and have the rights required to publish their work under
the relevant license.
A CLA gets around this by having an explicit Contributor Licensing
Agreement where developers explicitly grant a license to some entity
(usually the project's sponsoring entity or a non-profit supporting
the project).
I don't consider it correct to see a CLA as "getting around" what the
DCO does. The DCO (in typical form) and (typical) CLAs are doing
different, though overlapping, things.
Both Mozilla and the Kernel, and several other projects, have
avoided a CLA for a number of reasons - if you're aiming for a
diverse developer base (as we are in oVirt) this can slow down
adoption and participation by 3rd parties. For that reason, I would
not encourage the adoption of a CLA for oVirt.
Since at this point the only logical explicit inbound licensee entity
for a (conventional) CLA would seem to be Red Hat, I would also note
more strongly that Red Hat refuses to be the named inbound licensee
for a CLA for oVirt. This issue was dealt with at the inception of
oVirt.
- RF